Over the summer I looked for a good little eReader that I could take with me during my travels or while I was sitting on a train heading into work. With a new job solidified, and knowing I’d be on the train for at least 60 minutes each day, I went out looking for an eReader that suited my needs. I didn’t have any fancy requests, I did not need it to be running a full OS or anything of that sort. I wanted something simple and light. Being a fan of Chapters and purchasing almost all of my books and magazines through them, I first decided to look at the Kobo Touch. It was light, came in a few different colours and did exactly what I wanted, stored books and held a charge for about a month. Perfect! Or so I thought.
Having done little research, I decided that I’d pick up the Touch. It had the features that I wanted, it was priced right and it fulfilled what I needed it for. At $139 it was a wise investment. Utilizing the Kobo library which I could not only use on the Kobo Touch, but also on my iPad (which was on its way at the time), my iPhone or even using the downloadable portal, I began my eReader journey and testing with some free digital downloads of Star Wars. The touch has built in wifi which made it very simple to load the books, I wasn’t required to do anything aside from logging into my Kobo account. The books loaded onto the device using OTA (over the air) technology which kept my library and bookmarks in sync. The most welcomed thing about having the Kobo library was that any device that I was signed into, would be synced to the exact point I had left off at. I could start reading on the Kobo, continue on my Mac and finish on my iPad.
The Touch also has some very useful features built in. Wifi aside, having the ability to customize the text size, font and switch between day and night reading makes it a worthy commuter or bedside companion. Think about it this way, like BlackBerries were the leader in email communication back 10 years ago, the Kobo Touch (in my opinion) is the perfect little eReader. I know that many people will scowl at the fact that I did not do any comparisons to other products but I won’t lie when I say I wasn’t interested in any other reader. I had done a bit of research through various readings, and I really did not need any other add ons such as connectivity to the internet through 3G, email or the ability to add apps. I’m unfamiliar with the Amazon store and didn’t feel comfortable trying to learn something new. I’m not one that is afraid of change or discourages it, but I don’t like wasting my time either.
Like I said at the end of the first paragraph, I thought the Kobo Touch was the perfect device, yet as I write this, I no longer own one. I actually ended up returning it before my two weeks were up. There really was only one thing wrong with it. Despite it doing what I wanted it to do, it exceeded my initial expectations to be honest (the OTA syncing really surprised me) but it kept having issues with the memory. After about five days, I continuously kept getting an error. Specifically the error said “memory corrupted. please reset to factory settings.” or something along those lines. There was an option to ignore it and so I did and kept on reading. What was discouraging and frustrating though, was the fact that after multiple factory resets, it still kept giving me this error. So before my two weeks were up, I returned it. And I didn’t really regret it.
While writing this, Chapters will be releasing on November 2nd a new Kobo. The Kobo Vox, which will be running a version of Android 2.2 (according to what I’ve read) and tout all the features that many other eReaders currently have. Kobo is coming into the eReader feature category a bit late, but we’ll see what happens. I’m hoping to pick one up, take it for a week long run and then provide another review. For now, I’ve put reading on any tablet or eReader on hold. Works been super busy and I’m having troubles getting time to get some quality reading in.
Unboxing the Kobo Touch.
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